The passage: Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles us, and run with patience the race set before us, looking to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
The Collects for the other Sundays in Advent seem shaped by the Epistles that follow them. This day’s Collect seems to express the opposite temper from the Epistle: the Epistle speaks of “sore lets and hindrances” in running our race, while elsewhere we are told, “Rejoice evermore.” How can such melancholy fit with St. Paul’s command to rejoice?
I have been trying to show that the Eucharist reconciles many difficulties—why Christ’s Advent in humility and His Advent in glory are joined so closely in Scripture, why Scripture has so sacramental a character throughout, why the New Testament ministry surpasses yet is not cut off from the Old. Perhaps this difficulty too, which touches our deepest experience of grief and joy mixed together, would disappear if we entered more fully into this Festival and partook of it more faithfully.
I cannot separate these two things—understanding and receiving. Intellectual difficulties interfere with a simple, honest reception of God’s gift; and indifference or careless use of the gift makes our sense of its purpose dim and unsteady. This holds in every lesser case, so it must hold here. Some see more truly than they act, some act more truly than they see; but vision grows dim through insincere action, and action grows heartless when repeated without any wish to know its meaning or end. Light and warmth may differ, but we cannot safely assume one continues where the other is absent.
It is not unlikely that the words in Philippians helped shape the thought behind this Collect’s prayer, for nothing more readily makes us long for God to come among us in power than discovering how little we can rejoice without the recollection of His presence and goodness. The Philippians were more prone to despondency than most of Paul’s readers, and so he tells them more fully of their right to gladness. But the text from Hebrews evidently gave the Collect its form, and no other passage so fully expresses the meaning of Communion, gathering up what I have said in earlier sermons and preparing us for Christmas.
I. Rhetoricians commonly invoke departed worthies looking down to reprove or encourage their descendants. Such language has been abused and emptied of meaning, yet it still has power—it stirs even those who doubt the speaker’s sincerity. The speaker himself is often startled by the power he has raised, and credits himself with mere skill at a stale trick. He does himself an injustice: the response comes not to his paltry artifice but to the truth hidden within it. Men’s consciences tell them that they habitually forget the presence of unseen witnesses, and that when this thought is roused in them, they are in a truer state of mind, not a falser one—for they feel themselves better and more serious for it, and cannot trace a moral benefit to a lie.
The writer of Hebrews has been recalling to his Hebrew readers the deeds of their ancestors, all traced to faith in an unseen Lord and the substantial hope that faith rested on. They subdued kingdoms, did righteousness, stopped lions’ mouths, were made strong out of weakness, only because the unseen God was more real to them than anything visible. Now he speaks of these ancestors together, as a cloud of witnesses watching the Israelites of his own day, who run a race as hard, as hindered, as full of hope as theirs was. Each runner, however hard pressed, could be sure these witnesses’ sympathy and mysterious aid were with him at every moment.
Someone trained in rhetorical habits, knowing how religious writers of every school use such devices, might take these words for one more instance. It would not change his mind to point out how practical the previous chapter is, how impatient the writer was with fine speeches, since his heroes were doers, and it was to work and trust that he was rousing the flagging Christians of Palestine. Our modern habit would explain it as calculated stimulus. But the true answer is that the whole argument of the Epistle had been building toward proving that Christ tore the veil between the departed and the living; so it is a strict, logical conclusion that this cloud of witnesses is actually present with them, not conjured up by fancy. Believing these premises, the writer had a duty to use every power he had to break the hold of sense and its child, fancy, on his readers’ minds, and to make them look steadily at the facts of their position—not to work up unnatural excitement, but to clear away the delusions of indolence and despair.
The writer of Hebrews, then, is not copying the insincerity of orators who talk of saints looking down from shining seats as a trade. He is explaining why honest men, in their truest moments, facing death, have needed and confirmed the conviction that they were not alone, that the hosts on their side outnumbered those against them. It would be horrible if they acted rightly only because they believed a falsehood. It would be an infinite comfort to know they had a right to believe it then, that we have the same right always, and that the doubts resisting this belief in us are the false thing.
Yet however well we know these words, they do not by themselves give us this assurance. We can dismiss them as addressed to Hebrews of a particular age, by an inspired writer, in tones unlike anything we hear now. In hours of blessed sorrow such reasoning collapses and we feel sure what was true then is true now—but this does not last. Old doubts return; and if something of that hour’s insight remains, we too easily think it was meant specially for us, as if we were the favored ones who might turn Scripture’s promises to our own use—if we can. But everything hangs on that “if.” Can we, until we are taught again that we are no better than other men, that no truth about God and man can be a private possession?
The Communion continually reaffirms these words to every age and member of the Church. It says: the pillar of cloud that followed the Hebrews converted at Pentecost, ruled by James, addressed by Paul or one with Paul’s mind, follows you too. Many have been gathered into that cloud since. Every new face in it bears the same furrows as those before it; each has run the race, and by running it has learned to feel with those running now. If the doctrine of Hebrews is untrue, this Supper has no reason to exist. If it is true, one who partakes need not strain to imagine former combatants as present spectators—the Sacrament simply tells him that they are so. This may seem as strange to him as light to a child’s eyes, but the light is there, and he has organs to receive it, independent of whether he can yet fully see it—as a child gazes at a lamp or the sun with ever-growing, not lessening, wonder.
II. It is not easy to convince ourselves that we are really running a race, any more than that we have witnesses. This thought too has grown stale through repetition, yet it has gripped men everywhere and always, so it cannot be mere fancy. Those striving for worldly eminence feel it applies to them—they live to outrun others, fairly or not, for prizes worth having or worthless, and the one who sacrifices most has the best chance of winning. The Greek games and Roman arena often supplied images to St. Paul’s mind. In Philippians he speaks of forgetting what is behind and reaching toward what is ahead, pressing toward the prize of God’s high calling in Christ Jesus. That he was not trying to outrun others is clear from his eagerness that the Philippians run the same course, and from his testimony that his greatest reward is to share his joy with them. Yet despite this crucial difference between him and worldly competitors, he was convinced the comparison held true—that spiritual striving toward a spiritual goal is as real as any bodily effort.
So he speaks of casting aside every weight, as runners must. This refers not only to freedom from burdens at the start, but to prior training—abstaining from food and drink that would dull them. Paul may mean this almost literally: that the same causes weakening the body’s activity weaken the spirit’s, and the same discipline serves both. But I think he means more directly those burdens that weigh on conscience and crush hope: the incubus of the past—evil done, good left undone, thoughts wandered, base desires cherished, hours of company abused and irrecoverable; the weight of the present—petty anxieties and vanities, occupations unworthy of a spirit; the ache of responsibilities not faced, uncertainty which path to take, the fear of having lost the way or moving in circles rather than forward; the weight of the future—doubts of what is coming on ourselves and the world, whether all we believe and see may be shadow. These are heavy weights—who knows how heavy in the brother kneeling beside us at the same altar? Yet there is a weight I have sometimes felt worse than these: a leaden indifference, as if nothing—past, present, future, world, self, or God—mattered at all.
When we are told to cast off these weights, every weight, the words please us at first but distress us on reflection. Do they not mock us? Who can cast off what is part of himself? Who can undo what has been, banish what is, or turn the mist over what is coming into sunlight? How can watching eyes help us do this? If they knew the secret, did it die with them, unshared? I think, brethren, some of them did impart it before they died, and perhaps we are learning the lesson from them even now. Is this not what the Lord’s Supper teaches—repeating the command, “Cast your burdens on the Lord,” and showing how it can be obeyed? He to whom past, present, and future are all one, who is and was and is to come, invites you into fellowship with Him through His Son. Seeking Him, you cast away these burdens onto the burden He bore who carried the sin of the world. You can bring all that has been, all that is, all you fear will be, before Him who knows it all—come with your darkness into His light—and rise a new man in Him who died and rose for you, putting off the old self and putting on the new man created after God in Christ Jesus.
III. So too the force of “the sin that so easily besets us”—surrounding us like a girdle—becomes clear. The image of a burden speaks to us all, but does not fully satisfy, for the sense of evil is too intimate and personal for mere oppression to describe. Is it always a weight pressing on us? Do we never embrace and cherish it? If disgust comes after, did not enjoyment come first—was the indulgence not courted, with no real wish to be free of it? These are hard questions, and often unwise ones to ask—for does debating the nature and degree of our sin not keep us in it? While we weigh how guilty we have been, does not the guilt grow? Do we not need something better than self-examination that keeps us fixed on ourselves and makes the judge complicit in the crime? Does not the Communion point another, better way—to a life-blood that cleanses from all sin, a divine dying Love more subtle than sin itself, able to enter hollows of the spirit sin cannot reach, and drive it out and take its place? Whether we understand these promises or not, is anything else sufficient to free us from that penetrating poison in our blood? If we cannot understand, will not God give understanding—is that not the very thing we ask of Him? Is there any refuge from a cold, dark, selfish nature except in the nature of a pure and loving Being in whom is no darkness at all?
The self-examination the Church asks before this bread and cup, I believe, is not an inquiry into whether we have inward qualifications to come, but whether we truly want to be rid of ourselves—whether we would welcome a Deliverer from what degrades us, a Friend in whom we might inherit the righteousness and truth we lack and can never gain except by forgetting ourselves and seeking them in Him. It is indeed profane to come to a Sacrament of fellowship with a righteous Being if we would rather be without such fellowship, of a new nature if we prefer our old, base one. So to examine whether we are in the faith—that is, whether we count Christ the Deliverer and Giver of new life, as Scripture says He is—is truly needed preparation for the Marriage Supper. If He has not taken on man’s nature, if He is not the Bridegroom of Humanity, if He has not died that we might share His risen life, the Sacrament is a falsehood and we are false to come to it. Through the dullness of our spirits and love of routine, such forgetfulness steals over us continually, so we should be grateful for any warning that God is in earnest whether we are or not, and that He would rather afflict us with sickness and death than let us be cheated of the blessing through distrust and ingratitude. Such warnings, like all that happens around and within us, are goads driving us to the Father of our spirits, not reasons to turn from Him—not meant to unsettle us with anxiety, but to show us why we must cast off such anxieties, since they only hinder the race we are running.
IV. This is the text’s next theme: we throw off these weights and this besetting sin because we cannot run carrying them, or can only run impatiently and unevenly. Does “running” mean only what we call religious acts, preparing for another world? I take it to mean a man’s whole business in the world—everything he wants, works for, thinks in solitude, does in society, his home life, his politics, even his humblest tasks. Whatever he does, he is running some race, aiming at something he supposes attainable someday. The text says there is one common goal for all men, which, set before them in their different callings, makes every calling human rather than selfish—the work of a creature who looks upward, not one who crawls and eats dust. All such work requires patience—to do the task well, to bear the obstacles to it, to make it serve a higher, universal end. This is why, in old times, the State treated Communion as a qualification for public office. That doctrine was abused for grasping, party ends, and we may be glad no law enforces it now; but the principle behind it still holds, whether we grasp it or not—and understanding it fully would be the secret of all moral and social reform. No office administered by or affecting men may be held as an earthly patron’s gift or a prize for cunning; such offices are stewardships from God, to be held every hour under His presence and judgment, their abuse repented of, their right use sought through His grace—otherwise they are performed either in cowardly deference to others or self-willed dependence on oneself, in either case to the harm of those they are meant to serve.
V. Some may think the closing words of the text lift it out of our common duties into a loftier sphere. The Apostle says: looking to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God’s throne. Here is the full meaning of all that has gone before—correcting the worst tendencies of both religious and worldly people, vindicating our whole human life from the narrowness of each. Preachers often tell us to think of death as the goal of our life’s work and to run toward it; but this writer points to a different goal: Jesus Christ, the Giver of life, is the goal of the race, and runners who fix their eyes elsewhere will miss the prize. We are often told to examine our faith, to ask whether we have a right to claim Christ as Savior; but the Epistle tells us to look past our faith to the living Person who is its only root and end—our faith rests not in itself but in Him, and if we look to it instead of Him, it dies. We are bidden to look to One who bore the cross, died as man, rose as man, ascended as man; every act by which we know Him concerns our whole race. And we are encouraged to cast off the slothful, cowardly, self-seeking nature that belongs to us as individuals, and to be clothed instead with His enduring, self-sacrificing nature, who died and lives for all. How this is done, He Himself shows us: He had a goal before Him as we have—His Father’s eternal love always before Him. In darkness, agony, and desertion, He cast Himself and us upon that love. The joy set before Him was the joy of making men share in it.
And now we may begin to grasp the force of the words, “Take, eat, this is My body; drink, this is My blood.” Those hindered in running their race may share in that human and divine nature that was in Him. This is the pledge that God raises up His power and comes among us in our weakness and ignorance; the pledge that we may cast every weight pressing on us, on our fellows, on the world, before His Cross; that we may lay other men’s sins and our own—are they not the same evil, the same death, however different in form?—before Him who was made sin though He knew no sin. This is our ground for thanking God for all men and all things—for birth into a world of sorrow, for every sorrow found there, for all that has taught us our common blood with all humanity. This warrants us to pray for all, known and unknown, friend and enemy, and to hope for all. This assures us that Christ’s coming in the flesh truly was glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, goodwill to men. This is the pledge of the pierced side and wounded hands given to us as to the Apostle; today we remember that Christ is risen indeed, our Lord and our God. This is the pledge that we belong not merely to a fighting body but to the Church of the firstborn, the assembly of just men made perfect; that our spirits may already be with Him in heaven, needing no descent of Christ into earthly elements. This is the witness that we are not dreaming, but awaiting what must come by the eternal laws of God’s universe and the oath of Him who cannot lie—a coming of Christ in His Father’s glory with the holy angels, a day of redemption when He claims the universe He has purchased. This is the voice reaching us out of the depths of sorrow and anguish: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice.”